Our Nervous Friends — Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness

by Robert S. Carroll

Francis was large for his age, unusually active and remarkably direct mentally, therefore little adjustment was needed as he entered that usually leveling community—boy-school-life. He was generous and good- hearted to a lovable degree and with such qualities and advantages he early became, and remained, leader in his crowd. After his father died, the boy, not unnaturally, placed him—the only one whose will he had ever had to respect—high in his reverence. The father had been a powerful young man, a boxer to be feared, oar one in the Varsity Crew; a man who, through the force and brilliancy of his business life, had won more than state-wide prominence, and had left many influential friends who spoke of him in highest respect. It was to be expected that the father's strong character would have deeply influenced his only son, and like father like son, only more so, he grew. But the "more so" is our tale.

"Rare, juicy tenderloin steaks go to muscle. You don't need much else, and we didn't get much else at the training-table," the father used to say, and they unquestionably formed the bulk of the boy's naturally fine physique, for he developed in spite of much physical misuse into a two-hundred-pound six-footer. Francis began smoking at twelve. On his tenth birthday a small wine glass had been filled for him and thereafter he always had wine at dinner, and he liked it—not only the effects but the taste. The desire was in his blood—Before he was eighteen he was brought home intoxicated and unconscious. No law had ever entered into his training which suggested any form of self-control. The principles of self-mastery were unthought; they had been untaught. "Eat, drink and be merry" might express the sum of his ideals. And so, physically or mentally, no thought of restraint entered his youthful philosophy. There was nothing vicious, no strain of meanness, much generosity; naturally kindly and practically devoid of any spirit of contention, and peculiarly free from any touch of the disagreeable, he was blessed with a spirit of good fellowship. He never questioned the rights of his friends to do as they pleased, and they quite wisely avoided questioning his right to do likewise; so, desire was untrammeled and grew apace. It was in Francis Kent's failure to bridle this power that the threads were first snarled.

The boy's fine body was trained in a haphazard way. Had his father lived, it might have been different. Mentally, he was naturally industrious and next to the joys of the flesh came his studies. It was as toastmaster at his "prep-school" commencement-banquet that he first drank to intoxication. The next fall he entered Yale, and there is no question but those days this revered university had a "fast set" that was emphatically rapid. But Francis Kent could go the paces; in fact, none of the football huskies could put in a night out and bring as snappy an exterior and as clear a wit to first class next morning as young Kent. His heredity, his beefsteaks, the gods, or something, certainly made it possible for him to be a "bang-up rounder" and at the same time an acceptable student through four college years.

He was almost gifted in a capacity for the romance literatures, and, anomalous though it may seem, he majored and excelled in philosophy. He was truly a popular fellow when he took his degree at twenty-two. High living had given him high color; his eye was active and his face, though somewhat heavy, was mobile with the sympathy of intelligence; his physique was good; he dressed with a negligee art which was picturesque. Big of heart, he had a wealth of scholarly ideas, and not a few ideals; many thought he faced life a certain winner.

Practically every door was open to him, and he chose—Europe. Those were two hectic years. Every gait was traveled; for weeks he would go at top-speed, go until nerve and blood could brook no more. No conception of the duty of self-restraint ever reached him till, at last, the nervous system, often slow to anger, began to express its objection to the abuse it was suffering. He was not rebounding as in the past from his excesses. For a day or so following a prolonged drinking bout he would be apprehensive and depressed, unable to find an interest to take him away from the indefinite dread which haunted him. Not till he could again stand a few, stiff glasses of brandy could he find his nerve. A friend found him thus "shot up" one day and suggested that he was "going the pace that kills," and hinted that another path might be trod with wisdom. "What's the use?" Kent flung back, "I'm fated to go with an alcoholic liver; it's in the family strong—both sides. I saw my father go out with it. I know Mendel's theory by heart, two black pigeons never parent a white one." And on he went. His creed now might well have been: "For to-morrow I die."

It may have been the impulsion of an unrecognized fear—he said it was philosophic interest—which had attracted him to study the various theories of heredity. He had been particularly impressed by Mendel's "Principles of Inheritance," and its graphic elucidation of the mathematical recurrence of the dominant characteristics had grasped him as a fetish. With such forebears as his, there was no hope. The die had been cast before he was born. Why struggle against the laws of determinism? He was what he was because forces beyond his control had made him so. Scientific certainty now seemed to add its weight of evidence to his accepted fatalism, when, at twenty-eight, instead of the accustomed days of depression, a period of particularly heavy drinking was followed by a serious attack of delirium tremens. For several days he was cared for as one dangerously insane. After reason had been restored, the doctor, in his earnest desire to help, warned him that he must live differently and, knowing the father's ending, thought to frighten him into a change of habits by stating that his drinking would kill him in a few years if he kept it up. "You are already in the first stages of cirrhosis," he told him. As it turned out, no warning could have been less wise; it simply assured Kent the certainty of the fate which pursued, and soon he was at it again. Before thirty he had suffered two attacks of alcoholic delirium, had been a periodic drinker for fifteen years, a regular drinker for five years, often averaging for weeks two quarts of whiskey a day, and always smoking from forty to fifty cigarettes. Life had become more and more unlivable when he was not narcotized by alcohol or nicotine, and he was fast becoming a pitiful slave to his intoxicated and damaged nervous system.

He was living at home now, nominally secretary of a strong corporation—practically eating, smoking, drinking, theater-going, lounging at the Varsity Club, and playing with his speedy motorboat. He enjoyed music and, when in condition, occasionally attended concerts. Barely he went to the Episcopal service, then only when special music was given. The faithful will discern the hand of Providence in his first seeing Martha Fullington in one of these rare hours at church. She was truly a fine, wholesome woman. The daughter of a small town Congregational minister of the best New England stock, she had always been healthy in body and mind. She possessed an unusual contralto voice, and came to Buffalo at twenty-two for special training. Helpful letters of introduction, with her pleasing self and good voice, rapidly secured her friends and a position in a fashionable church-choir. Here Kent heard her in a short but effectively rendered solo. Unsusceptible as he had been in the past, the sacredness of her religiously inspired face appealed to him strangely. Within a fortnight a new and profound element was to complicate his life, for he met Miss Fullington and took her out to dinner at the home of a classmate, whose mother was befriending the young singer. The spell of her charm wakened the power of his desire. Whether it was from the stimulation of her inherent difference to other women he had known, or whether deep within, and as yet untouched, there was a fineness which instinctively recognized and responded to fineness, we may not say with certainty. He was remote from her every standard, she thought, and her seeming indifference was a conscious self-defense. But she inspired him with a sincerity of purpose he had not known before. He was frank; he was potently insistent and "hopeless," he told her, "unless you save me." Thus unwittingly he appealed to the mother sympathy, the strongest a good woman can feel.

They were engaged and the wedding was all that any bride could have desired. Then ten weeks abroad, beautiful, revealing weeks, for Francis Kent, sober and in love, was much of a man. Still it was only ten weeks before the formal social function, with its inevitable array of wines, turned this kindly, genial lover, in an hour, into a coarse, inconsiderate drunkard. Confined for a week in their state-room on the steamer home with her husband, now a beast in drink, this poor, pure, uninitiated wife realized purgatory. Dark days were those next three years for them both. When sober, he was self-abased by the knowledge of the suffering of this woman he so truly loved, or was restlessly striving against desires which only alcohol could sate; while she was alternately fearing the debauch or fighting to keep her respect and love intact through the debauchery. For him, the battle waged on between love and desire, his love for her—his one inspiration, while desire was constantly reenforced by the taunts of his godless fatalism and the dead weight of his hopelessness.

Then came the day which is hallowed in the lives of even the ignorant and coarse, the day in which the young wife gladly suffers through the lengthening hours and goes down to the verge of the Dark River, that in her nearness to death she may find that other life, the everlasting seal of her marriage. In all the beauty of eagerly desired motherhood, Martha Kent bore her baby-boy. The father was not there. She did not then know all. They shielded her. He had been taken the night before to a private asylum, entering his third attack of delirium tremens, and while his wife in pain and prayer made life more sacred, he, struggling and uncontrolled, beast-like, was making life more repulsive. The pain of her motherhood never approached the agony of her wifehood, when she knew, while the pride of fatherhood was utterly submerged in the poignancy of his self-abasement, when he realized.

Another physician had treated him during this attack. He, too, wished to help. He talked with the humiliated man most earnestly, insisting that he had never truly tried, that in the past he had depended on his weak will and the inspiration of his devotion. He had not had scientific help. He assured him that he did not have incurable hardening of the liver and expressed, as his earnest belief, that there were places where the help he needed could be given—that there was hope. Plans were made and Francis Kent gave his pledge, expressed in a voluntary commitment, to carry out a six months' system of treatment. "Not," as he assured the physician-in-charge, "that I can be saved from the effects of what has gone before. I know my heredity is too strong for that. But by every obligation of manhood I owe my wife and boy five years of decent living. If you can make that possible, I shall be satisfied." The professional help Kent received, physically, was deep-reaching. It accurately adjusted food to energy expended. Forty self-indulgent cigarettes were transformed into three manly cigars, and he was put to work with his hands—those patrician hands which had not made a brow to sweat, for serious purpose, in three generations. His physical response in six weeks completely altered his appearance. The snap of healthy living reappeared; the pessimism of his fatalism was displaced by much of quiet cheer. Life was again becoming a good thing. But the professional help he received mentally was what untangled the snarl. His advisor was fortunately able to go the whole way with him as he discussed his hereditary "inevitables"—the whole way and then, savingly, some steps beyond— and for the first time Kent's understanding, now reaching for higher truths than would satisfy the fatalist, was wisely, personally conducted through a wholesome interpretation of the distinction between the heritage of germinal and of somatic attributes, that vital distinction: that it takes but two ancestors to determine the species of the offspring, but that the individual's personal heritage is the result of, and may be influenced by, a thousand forerunners; that dominant characteristics, compelling though they seem, may be neutralized by obscure, recessive characteristics. More than this, his new counselor was able to convince him that the real damage he had to overcome was not a foreordained physical fate, for that was in a peculiar way largely in his own hands, now that he was properly started, but was the mental tangle of his unholy fatalism which absolutely did not represent truth; that he and all rational, normal men have been given wills and are as free as gods to choose, within certain large limitations. Francis Kent's mind had been well trained. Selfish desire had made of him a fatalist. A more beautiful desire led him into a constructive optimism. He thought deeply for a week, perchance he prayed, for he knew that she was praying from the depths of her soul. He outlined for himself a new, thoroughly wholesome mode of life, and in half an hour's heart-to-heart conference convinced his doctor-friend that more had been accomplished in two months than could have been promised at the end of the six months planned. So the new Francis Kent was told to go back and make a new home for his wife and the new baby. Years have passed—blessed years in the old mansion. There is no hint of cirrhosis of the liver. There has never been a drop of anything alcoholic served in that house since his return. There are two healthy chaps of boys; there is a wonderfully happy woman; there is a fine, manly man, the respected and efficient president of an influential bank. Patient, wise hands carefully untangled the knotted snarl. The thread was unbroken.